Google Search Rivals Strike Back With 'Don't Be Evil' Code

A team of engineers at Facebook, Twitter, and some other Web sites have created "Focus on the User," featuring a "don't be evil" bookmarklet that eliminates Google's emphasis on its own Google+ social network.

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A team of engineers at Facebook, Twitter, and some other Web sites have created "Focus on the User," featuring a "don't be evil" bookmarklet that eliminates Google's emphasis on its own Google+ social network.

The Focus on the User team also released a Web site and a proof-of-concept bookmarklet for Chrome that, when clicked, reorders the search results to include other social networks in the right-hand column of results. Not surprisingly, Twitter and Facebook results are prominently highlighted, although the bookmarklet's creators said they're using Google's own weighting and rankings to select results from any social network, and not just their own.

On Jan. 10, Google launched Google Search Plus Your World, which attempts to reorder search results, factoring in a user's social network. A search for "Giants-49ers score," for example, might return the latest score for the game, as well as responses and shared articles from the user's social network.

The problem, according to Twitter and others, was that the redesign favored responses and input from only Google's Google+ networknot Facebook and Twitter, both of which offer larger social networks with presumably more relevant content. (By contrast, Focus on the User claims that Google itself buries links to relevant Google+ pages, several results pages down.) Although Google's new search features can be turned off, those sites still protested Google's favoritism.

For example, a video accompanying the Focus on the User site notes that a search for "cooking" turns up a chef Jamie Oliver as a suggested Google+ user, but then links to a Google+ page that hasn't been updated in months. Instead, the video suggests, Google should include a link to Oliver's Twitter page, which was updated in the last few days.

"Would Google's search features return more relevant results if they included the entire social Web, rather than only Google's social network?" the video asks.

Google representatives did not respond to requests for comment. Facebook, and Twitter representatives declined to comment. Microsoft, whose Bing search engine is a rival of Google's, said it had no involvement with the site, and declined further comment.

The Focus on the User bookmarklet is a small piece of code that can be copied to the Chrome bookmarks bar. After visiting Google and performing a search, the bookmarklet can be clicked, reordering the results whether they be on Flickr, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace, Quora, Tumblr, Foursquare, Crunchbase, FriendFeed, Stack Overflow, Github, or Google+. As long as the user doesn't leave the Google page, all subsequent results will be reordered according to the bookmarklet.

Focus On the User seems to have concentrated almost exclusively on the right-hand column of results, where Google's Search Plus Your World suggests Google+ users to follow, based on the query.
A quick PCMag test of the bookmarklet, however, doesn't reveal that much difference. Social searches still favor Google+ results in the main page. In the right-hand column, the bookmarklet replaced those results with its own, so that the "cooking" query suggested Jamie Oliver's Twitter page, then Alton Brown's Twitter page, and then a third link from Facebook. But the names and the order of such didn't appear to change from one implementation to the next, just the social networks that were shown.

In some cases, the indented "social result" in the main column of search results will also be replaced with what Focus on the User says is a more relevant Facebook or Twitter page.

Focus on the User claims that no server or API was used or accessed besides the one that Google itself uses. To generate the results for a given query, the bookmarklet does a Google search for each person affiliated with the search terms, looks at the top 10 pages of Google's results, and then picks out the highest-ranked social result as judged by Google. Below each user, the person's other social-network pages are added as text links.

Focus on the User also shows images from networks like LinkedIn, which the site claims Google inexplicably blocks.

Mark Hachman Mark joined ExtremeTech in 2001 as the news editor, after rival CMP/United Media decided at the time that online news did not make sense in the new millennium.
Mark stumbled into his career after discovering that writing the great American novel did not pay a monthly salary, and that his other possible career choice, physics, required a degree of mathematical prowess that he sorely lacked.
Mark talked his way into a freelance assignment at CMP’s Electronic Buyers’ News, in 1995, where he wrote the...
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